[lbenes]

I've seen this accusation thrown out there on social media a few times now. When I've asked for examples, no one been able to provide a list showing that this is actually a systemic problem. With resources like the Internet Archive it should be trivial to prove that this really a problem. Can you back up your claims?

Journalists are people and make mistakes. But overall, respected institutions like NYT, WSJ, WaPo, and Bloomberg show good journalistic integrity and print retractions in both print and online.

If you really are seeing this problem regularly, i suggest you find better sources for your news. Above all avoid getting it from social media. The actual fake news that is rampant there is a much, much bigger threat to our society than the few bad apples or mistakes behind the problem you are describing.

[viridian]

You cite the Wall Street Journal as a respected institution, but I know I've seen them do this. Part of the problem with this type of thing is that publications often go out of their way to erase the existence of an aritcle if they intend to delete it.

Here's an example of an articles scrubbed from existence, including from the internet archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170301000000*/http://www.wsj.c...

http://www.wsj.com/article_email/hillary-clinton-vs-foia-144...

It's also unavailable, but searchable via google. Google simply shows a 404 page from the WSJ as the top result. The WSJ has never formally retracted this either.

Now since this is the WSJ, obviously the article was copied wholesale and pasted into blogs and the like regardless, so it can't be completely scrubbed. As a matter of fact, a search for:

"The filing was a response to a FOIA lawsuit brought in March by conservative organization Citizens United" will bring up many blogs with the full text of the article, but that doesn't change the fact that WSJ silently scrubbed the article from the internet archive, their own website, and the google cache.

[datashow]

Funny, I searched "The filing was a response to a FOIA lawsuit brought in March by conservative organization Citizens United", and the first result in google is from here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/hillary-clinton-vs-foia-1443136...

Aslo, if you search "url:http://www.wsj.com/article_email/" , you won't find any active link at all. It seems they have changed their website structure.

[viridian]

Strange, the first result for me is the one I linked. Same if I search the name of the article. Google doesn't show me yours at all.

Happy to admit I was wrong about this though. I only remember this article because it came up in a thread about Internet Archive removing content sometimes without any explanation.

[fredophile]

Check out this twitter account for some examples.

https://mobile.twitter.com/nyt_diff?lang=en

[ramblerman]

Those institutions are not the ones they were 10-20 years ago. And with less and less revenue streams they have resorted to clickbait like the rest.

I suggest you wake up to the reality of modern 'journalism'.

WaPo just recently messed up completely with the death of Baghdadi (the isis leader). Titling the article about his assassination as "Austere religious scholar dies at 48"

They had to change it 3 more times till they actually mentioned that he was assassinated. And that was just a mistake.

[Clubber]

This is absolutely correct, it's shitty that people are downvoting you for it. Matt Taibbi even said as much on Joe Rogan.

Journalists aren't some deity to be put on a pedestal. They are employees that work for a corporation, usually a really big one. That corporation's business model is dying and they are cutting costs to survive and have been for 20 years.

[ht85]

What about this [1] ? It is from "respected" WaPo, and this is one of the most mind blowing examples.

You might not want to go through the 1h30 rant from Richard Lewis, so feel free to skip to 31:00 and 34:30 for the content of the original article.

I really don't know what to make of this. I just can't imagine what would prompt people to write and then actually publish this.

You can read the comments on the article [2], there is no errata on the article and I haven't seen any official response from the Washington Post.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fay_X1Cu9Uc

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/abu-bakr-al-...

Edit: Actually there is an official response, at 39:20, a tweet (sigh) which might be even more scandalous than that headline

[bragh]

Retractions are kind of a bandaid. They should not even be needed if journalists did their due diligence. Worst case I personally saw was a claim by a journalism lecturer that a small news site was alt-right from its inception and wrote a long screed lambasting the site - no, it wasn't, it got sold to a different owner a couple of years after creation because the original owners could not monetize it.

They even got the year of the creation of the site wrong. So, a person teaching journalism didn't even bother running a WHOIS query and spending 2 EUR to run a query against business registry. If that is the level of the teachers, then what can you expect from the people they taught?

[excursionist]

I see this happening pretty much every day for political news. I don't keep track of a list, but here is a recent example:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/us/politics/bernie-sander...

> Mr. Uygur, a longtime supporter of Mr. Sanders, has also disparaged former President Barack Obama on his show, argued that bestiality should be legal and hosted white supremacist figures, including David Duke. In one clip that circulated on Twitter, Mr. Duke ends an interview by saying, “I am not, what you call a racist,” to which Mr. Uygur replies sarcastically, “No, of course not.”

They added the word 'sarcastically' and also added this after:

> Mr. Uygur called the clip a “complete smear” that had been taken out of context from a combative one-hour interview in which he pushed back on Mr. Duke.

In reality, NYT published a smear about Cenk Uygur, claiming he was supporting and agreeing with this white supremacist David Duke. This was a straight up lie, since Cenk spent the entire interview criticizing and arguing with David Duke, not agreeing with him at all. This caused an outrage among Cenk's supporters, and NYT quietly updated their article so that now it says almost the opposite of the original! Also, note that the smear was published after Cenk decided to run for Congress and the reporter knew that the clip used to support the 'Cenk agrees with David Duke' smear was out of context. [1]

[1] https://www.mediaite.com/news/ny-times-corrects-report-on-ce...

[manfredo]

The Cenk Uygur situation is part of a broader trend I observe where traditional media outlets have a highly negative bias, to the point that it often ventures into the realm of fabrication, towards news and people in new media. News distributed via YouTube and social media and similar are an existential threat to the traditional news publications, and the thus there exists a fundamental conflict of interest when the latter covers the former.

[Defenestresque]

You mentioned WaPo. Here is an article[0] about WaPo publishing a story about "Russian hackers infiltrating a US electrical grid." In addition to the article being inaccurate, WaPo edited the copy several times to correct major errors of fact without adding an editorial note and refused to explain what led them to their incorrect conclusions.

The article is a bit too long to accurately summarise, but essentially WaPo published a story under the following headline: “Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, U.S. officials say.”

>The lead sentence offered “A code associated with the Russian hacking operation dubbed Grizzly Steppe by the Obama administration has been detected within the system of a Vermont utility, according to U.S. officials” and continued “While the Russians did not actively use the code to disrupt operations of the utility, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss a security matter, the penetration of the nation’s electrical grid is significant because it represents a potentially serious vulnerability.”

This is at best a deeply misleading intro. The malware was found on a laptop not connected to the grid. The allegation that "Russian hackers penetrated the electrical grid" because they found tools which once may have been developed by Russians is about as accurate as me concluding that a hypothetical murderer was American because the murder weapon was an American-made AR-15.

There are several more concerning parts to the story but alas, I'm on mobile and have slacked off long enough.

I don't buy into the "MSM are knowing purveyors of fake news because profit!" but humans make mistakes and the desire of mainstream newspapers to beat bloggers in timeliness and pageviews can ultimately lead to standards slipping even among writers who would never knowingly publish a false story.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/01/01/fake-ne...

[caseysoftware]

I'll suggest an alternative theory.

You know how absurd and wrong the Russia/powergrid story is specifically because this is your industry. If this wasn't your industry, you would read it, not have the understanding and experience to critique, and therefore probably believe it.. even if it was later retracted. The same applies to us reading about other fields.

My wife was a Capital Hill reporter in DC. Quite often, she had an hour or two to turn around a story on a hearing that just occurred on a topic she didn't know. Now multiply that by 4, 5, or 10 times each day.

It doesn't take maliciousness, just incompetence and/or ignorance at scale.

Michael Crichton named this:

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them."

Ref: http://larvatus.com/michael-crichton-why-speculate/

[blackflame]

Here is an article from CNN criticizing NYT on their terribly botched Kavanaugh story recently. https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/16/media/new-york-times-kavanaug...

[danso]

I am as journalist-sympathetic as anyone on here, but even I would agree with the previous commenter's sentiment. Minimization of errors is an old and persistent problem in journalism, and the reasons for this can be relatively innocuous – e.g. general incompetence and complacency; not only in making the error, but also not having a system in place to collect and evaluate feedback/complaints from readers, nor to adequately disseminate a correction if one has been made – to outright dishonesty and cowardice (errors are generally a stain on a journalist's professional career).

The best argument that this is a systemic problem is to simply point out the lack of systemic accountability: as people have pointed out, no major news site has a diff/version history (even though most content management systems have some kind of version tracking), which would be the bare minimum (and best return on value) for digital publishers who prioritize accountability.

(The closest thing is newsdiffs.org, but that's an independent site [0])

If you want a real, recent error that illustrates the low importance of media corrections, I can give you one from this past week: when the New York Times erroneously reported that the Trump administration issued an executive order that would "define Judaism as a nationality". Here's a relevant excerpt from the earliest Internet Archive version of the article [1]:

> Mr. Trump’s order will declare that Judaism may be considered a national origin.

To say that this article caused a violent orgasm of Twitter fury and shock would be a vast understatement; you can search for tweets quote-tweeting the original @nytpolitics tweet to see for yourself. [2].

A few hours later, the NYT article had been significantly updated [3], with no correction or comment by the main NYT social media accounts, or by the individual reporters' Twitters (which are both very active). This is how the aforementioned excerpt was changed (and how it currently is as of today):

> Mr. Trump’s order will have the effect of embracing an argument that Jews are a people or a race with a collective national origin in the Middle East, like Italian Americans or Polish Americans

If the significance of the change isn't self-evident, then this tweet thread+article goes into detail about how big of a clusterfuck the original NYT article was [4].

To my knowledge, the NYT has said nothing about the mistake or the silent correction. Neither have the reporters. And as much outrage as the original article caused, it was all quickly forgotten (even faster than usual) because the mass shooting at the kosher market [5] and the UK elections the next day.

To me, this incident is emblematic of how their accountability is systemically lackadaisical. It's undeniable that the NYT does make corrections, but we only know of the errors that were noticed and were officially corrected. By definition, we can't easily know the errors that were never noticed, or were silently fixed.

In this situation, we have an error that is as egregious and infuriating as one can imagine in today's politics (Trump + executive authority + anti-Semitism + Israel v. Palestine). But also, this is a serious error that ultimately had no consequences, because the original report was attributed to anonymous sources (i.e. no reputation damage) and the error involved matters of abstract policy and political grandstanding.

If the error did cause damage, such as defaming a public official, or causing an angry protest that turned into a riot, then I'm certain the NYT would issue a correction, just as it did recently with its misleading report re: Cenk Uygur and David Duke (albeit after 3 days of complaints from Uygur and his supporters) [6]. But regardless of whether there are aggrieved parties, news organizations should be making corrections solely because they value truth and accountability. That the NYT has so completely and brazenly refused to acknowledge its massive, noticeable fuckup (which, besides the error, indicates a real flaw in sourcing) means that their correction policy should be regarded as arbitrary and unserious.

tl;dr: if they didn't make a correction for an error this big and noticeable, imagine how reluctant they are to issue corrections for errors much less noticeable and/or controversial.

[0] http://newsdiffs.org/

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/opinion/sunday/article-ch...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20191210221006/https://www.nytim...

[2] https://twitter.com/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fnyt...

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20191211010003/https://www.nytim...

[4] https://twitter.com/Yair_Rosenberg/status/120483406506251468...

[5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/12/12/jersey-city...

[6] https://twitter.com/nytpolitics/status/1206722302416687110

[gamblor956]

The NYT article was correct.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act applies to discrimination on the basis of nationality, color, or race.

By using Title VI, the Trump administration defined Jews as a race, color, or nationality. However, as Jews come in many races and colors already, the logical conclusion was that the Trump administration was defining Judaism as a nationality.

Additional support for this comes from the fact the order adopts the IHRA definition of what it means to be anti-Semitic, which includes among other things, criticism of the state of Israel.

[danso]

No, it was not correct. You can read the executive order for yourself: https://jewishinsider.com/2019/12/exclusive-a-first-look-at-...

And I again recommend this thread from Yair Rosenberg: https://twitter.com/Yair_Rosenberg/status/120457682761800499...

I posted the relevant original excerpt and what it was changed to. It is unequivocally different, and such a substantive change almost always necessitates a clarification if not a correction.

That was only one part of the article that was changed. The article's subhed/deck was also completely changed:

https://web.archive.org/web/20191210221006/https://www.nytim...

> The president’s action will define Judaism as a nationality, not just a religion, and empower the Education Department to withhold money from institutions that tolerate anti-Israel movements.

https://web.archive.org/web/20191211010003/https://www.nytim...

> The president’s action will protect Judaism under civil rights law and empower the Education Department to withhold money from institutions that tolerate anti-Israel movements.

[gamblor956]

I did read the executive order. It refers to Title VI, which works the way I described in my comment.